Unconquered: 10 Principles to Overcome Adversity and Live above Defeat

INTRODUCTION

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE BATTLE

Which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?

LUKE 14:28 ESV

Nearly three years after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, American victories in the Southwest and Central Pacific took the fight within close proximity of Japan in the Battle of Peleliu, which was codenamed Operation Stalemate. American bombers were within striking distance of the Japanese main islands from bases secured during a campaign known as the Mariana Islands campaign from June to August 1944. According to Major General William Rupertus, the commander of the First Marine Division, the battle was only supposed to last four days; however, the campaign to occupy the airstrip on Peleliu lasted nearly three months.

The United States emerged victoriously, but it came at a high cost. According to the Marine Corps University website, there were over six thousand casualties.¹ This island was crucial for the United States to take because of its proximity between the United States and Japan, and it ended up being one of the bloodiest battles in World War II. Since 2009, civilians and military members have discovered over thirty-two thousand munitions on Peleliu.² While the government has attempted to discharge these bombs to make the island safer, undetonated explosives remain, and now, many decades after this Pacific paradise was a war zone, tourists must adhere to warning signs and designated walkways because of the number of undetonated explosives.

When I think about the stories from the Battle of Peleliu, I’m reminded of how our past can affect every aspect of our lives. And in its allegorical form, it’s an accurate representation of the way many feel defeated by past life experiences. Our past has the potential to be devastating to our present and future and can shape our perspective on life. We’ve all been like that Pacific island, a place where American forces fought heavy battles, and all that we recall are the charred remains and undetonated bombs, waiting for the moment they detonate and take out innocent relationships and sabotage good opportunities.

I don’t know what you’ve battled or what caused you the most pain in life, but I know you’re not alone in the fight. It’s not my intention to come across as shortsighted here nor as insensitive, but the reality is that many of us have endured abuse, tragedy, and deep soul pain. It could have resulted from your job in service to your country and the things you have witnessed or had to do in the course of your duty. Or it could have come at the hands of a family member, friend, or neighbor in the form of sexual abuse or physical abuse as a child. But as American military leaders and first responders do after any training or operation, we should look at our lives and determine what lessons we can learn from the pain we’ve experienced.

Through the lessons my experiences have taught me, one thing I’ve taken away is the opportunity to learn from the pain. I have learned how to become a better version of myself, a stronger, more resilient version. Experiences teach us to expect pain, to endure, to embrace trials and suffering—not because we’re strange but because we know there will be some good to come from it all. The addiction to comfort is killing our ability to reach our maximum potential. The addiction to ease and comfort creates weak societies.

We’re a different generation than the breed of warriors who fought for our nation in World War II. When I think about the men who fought for America then, I think about a portion of Eugene Sledge’s memoir entitled With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. In this acclaimed first-person account of the Battle of Peleliu, Sledge writes,

It was hard to sleep that night [before the invasion]. I thought of home, my parents, my friends—and whether I would do my duty, be wounded and disabled, or be killed. I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed, because God loved me. Then I told myself that God loved us all and that many would die or be ruined physically or mentally or both by the next morning and in the days following. My heart pounded, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Finally, I called myself a…coward and eventually fell asleep saying the Lord’s Prayer to myself."³

Mr. Sledge provides an incredible perspective of someone facing what we could easily describe as a nightmare if we could fathom what he saw the next day and felt that night. Imagine knowing you were walking into a death trap tomorrow, and you still went. You trusted in God, and through him, you found your strength, your peace, and your blessed assurance. What assurance—that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God! When we are in the throes of sorrow, his love may seem to be an eternity away, but that assurance and his promises are comforting and give us strength for the fight.

Identify the Undetonated Explosives in Your Life

As you read this, the memories of life’s battles may still be freshly lingering in your mind. The embers may still be redhot from the fires that roared through your life. Right now, you may be experiencing soul-wrenching pain; it feels like your throat is being squeezed, and you can’t breathe. Anxiety is a real thing. Panic attacks. I get it. You’re still in the fight.

During my training phase in the police academy, we were taught how to handle a number of different potential dangers we might face on duty. Our instructors would bring up things like high-risk traffic stops, felony warrants, high-speed pursuits, foot pursuits, shoot-outs, and ground fighting. The reality is that you can spend your entire life training and preparing, and the only battle you get into is the one you didn’t train to fight. There are going to be situations in which you are victorious only because of God. Otherwise, they are no-win situations.

I want to point out some clear strategies the enemy will use, some areas where our armor may have a vulnerability, how we can best prepare for what lies ahead, and how to best overcome what is behind us. It’s important to identify the areas where the enemy may attack you before the campaign against you is advanced. Think about each of these areas and see if any apply to you.

1. Ignoring the Pain: Do you pretend it didn’t happen? Ignoring the pain leads to a chain reaction of additional battles that you could avoid. Ignoring is not the answer, but addressing these wounds will lead to healing.

2. Refusing to Surrender: Do you try to control others or manipulate circumstances? When you try to heal through your own power, you’re not surrendering as God intends. There’s no such thing as controlling your surrender to God. It must be 100 percent, open hands, open hearts. We cannot control others, nor can we orchestrate or manipulate the circumstances of life in our favor. Relinquish control to the one who created life itself, be committed to taking the actions you are responsible for taking to find healing and freedom, and don’t worry about what others do or say.

3. Living in the Past: If you are still celebrating a victory from ten years ago but not facing the battles that left you wounded, you have been deceived. There’s a difference between living in the past and learning from it. Living in it keeps you from growing, maturing, and advancing. Learning from it makes you a mature, strong, and capable warrior who will overcome any battle that comes your way.

4. Refusing to Forgive: Maybe it makes you feel like you still retain some degree of wholeness, but it is not helping you at all. It’s a lie from the enemy and one of the most sensitive of undetonated bombs in your life. Forgiving the offender sets you free.

5. Emotions Gone Wild: It may feel like you’re the only one who has an emotional roller-coaster ride in life, but we need only look to the Old Testament to see how common this really is. David was an emotional wreck in the book of Psalms. But we must take captive our thoughts and emotions and align them with the truth of God’s Word.

6. Doing Things Your Way: This makes for good song lyrics but not a good life. Being in total control of everything is exhausting and overrated.

7. Toxic Relationships: There are some folks you need to distance yourself from. You know who they are, and unless there is abuse present, I am not referring to your marriage.

8. The Lost Wanderer: All your time and energy are expended fighting to find your way. You lack direction, aren’t clear on your purpose, and even wonder if it is all worth it. Pain can cause you to lose focus of your true north and divine purpose and throw you into a pit of confusion.

9. The Know-It-All: Your brain is stale, your heart is hard, and you’ve grown complacent. You’re a statistic waiting to happen in every area of your life. It’s time to get back to the warrior you were before the pain and before the pressure of life had an impact on you.

10. You Quit Before You Start: Quitting, like winning, begins in the mind; every time life gets hard, you want to quit. That changes here and now. Remove quit from your vocabulary and prepare to live on a different level of winning.

Those are ten notes I wrote to myself over the past several years as I navigated my own deep soul pain. I tried to carry it all on my own strength and abilities, and it almost killed me. The good news? You don’t have to carry the burden of pain or past sin or the memories of traumatic experiences. We have a compassionate God, one who not only forgives us for those things when we trust Jesus with our lives but who also forgets that we ever did anything wrong. Throughout God’s Word, we are reminded that, while he knows our pains, he keeps no record of the sins we give to him. Every aspect of our lives suffers when we allow the enemy to deceive us into believing we are too far gone, convince us that we are broken beyond repair, or cause us to be afraid of seeking help. The past has prepared us for the present—there are no accidents. We can either grow from it, learn from it, or wallow in it.

Fear is one battle we must all face. We must choose whether we will let fear lead us or whether we walk in faith. Those two things, fear and faith, cannot cohabitate in our lives. We must choose which one will be the primary influencer in our decisions, behaviors, thoughts, and words. We must also face the battle to forgive. God has forgiven us the moment we ask, but seeking the forgiveness of someone you have offended can be much more challenging.

The greater battle is whether you will forgive those who have deeply hurt you. If I were to ask you if those people who hurt you are worthy of forgiveness, you’d likely say no. It’s hard for me to fathom why or how God can or would even consider forgiving some human beings for the atrocities they’ve committed, but then that’s me judging. I can’t decide who is forgiven or who isn’t. Fear tells us that if we forgive someone who hurt us, then we are weak or setting ourselves up to be hurt again. I didn’t feel like the people who hurt me deserved to be forgiven, and then I remembered that when I least deserve forgiveness, God still forgives me.

Many of our underlying issues are unaddressed wounds from past traumatic experiences. To find healing, it is required that we lay these wounds down. It begins here, remodeling our minds with a better way of thinking. I’m not a victim. I am more than a conqueror. Don’t bottle it up as I did for over two decades. It bears no good fruit, only burdens and more pain.

During a battle, it’s not uncommon to feel God has forsaken you; you are not alone! In Psalm 22:1–2 (NIV), David expressed feelings of anguish and abandonment, echoing what Jesus said on the cross:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?

My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.

If David, and Jesus, felt abandoned by God in the most painful places of their lives, I think it’s okay if we acknowledge when we feel that way too. While this is not a book on trauma or pain specifically, it is written with the understanding that many have had life-changing traumatic experiences and still deal with the fallout from them to this day.

There’s someone in your life you can reach out to, someone you can talk to, someone who is waiting for the opportunity to listen to you. Maybe you’re healed, and it is you who is standing ready to reach out and help a brother or sister who is battling their own demons. We are all bearing scars from battles in this life, and none of us are unwounded, but we are all unconquered if we have surrendered our lives to Christ. Do not allow Satan to lure you into isolation because of your challenges. Fear will ruin your life. It can and will destroy you, and it is very seductive. Fear is empowered and given more authority in isolation.

Matters of the Mind

What do you think of when you see the Disney franchise or the name Walt Disney? What about Benjamin Franklin? Let’s add Vincent van Gogh, Stephen King, and Albert Einstein to the list. All the names listed above are people who have been incredibly successful, and we see the fruit of their labor to this day. But we often do not see the incredible adversity they endured and overcame to achieve greatness. Like Disney, Franklin, Van Gogh, King, or Einstein, under the pinnacle of success is a massive mountain of rejection, failure, disappointment, and pain. There are no overnight success stories. There is, however, a large population of people who have trained, attempted their feat, and lost. Their next step was to repeat steps one through three until they got it right.

It is my belief that we can learn something from everyone and from every circumstance, good or bad. Pleasurable or painful. Experiences that give us great joy or terrible sorrow. Mental defeat, sometimes abbreviated as MD, refers to the cognitive quit in your mind resulting from chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder (some refer to it as PTSD). If our minds quit, our bodies follow. And maybe you once had a dream, and you watched that dream die. Maybe you were on a journey to get fit and healthy, but you were injured and have regressed. Maybe your business venture failed, or maybe you’ve relapsed back into the grip of addiction. That’s where we truly quit: in our minds.

We must train our minds to abandon the desire to quit, the need for easy or comfortable living. If our minds can overcome the desire to quit and push us further than we’ve ever been, our bodies will follow. But if our spirit is wounded, our minds and bodies have a significantly more challenging battle. Each of the individuals listed in the examples above overcame the desire to quit when they faced adversity.

Let’s look deeper into their lives, starting with Walt Disney. He was fired from his first job because he was not creative or imaginative enough. Looking back, I think we can all agree that the person who fired him completely failed. Or did they? Was Walt Disney not creative or imaginative enough at the time? Perhaps those traits only developed and matured as he persisted and before launching the largest entertainment company in modern history.

What about Benjamin Franklin? At ten years of age, his parents could no longer afford to send him to school. But he did not let that stop him from obtaining an excellent education. Instead of quitting, Franklin read books and educated himself, ultimately leading to the invention of lightning rods, bifocals, and other devices, not to mention his invaluable contributions as a writer, statesman, and diplomat.

During his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh sold one painting out of his nine hundred pieces of art. Now, long after his death, he remains one of the most influential figures of the Western arts.

One of my personal favorites is the story of Stephen King. Now, I am no fan of horror and gore, but the mind of Stephen King and his mastery of the craft of writing has made me a fan of his. King, one of the most successful writers of our time, had his first book rejected by over thirty publishers. He literally threw the book in the trash until his wife discovered it and encouraged him to finish it. He has